Corrections: 0:00 To be extra extra clear The Library of Babel Website DOES NOT LITERALLY "CONTAIN" AS IN "STORE" EVERYTHING somewhere but it does have the potential to generate everything given enough time, which is nearly indistinguishable to searching through a theoretical library that does have everything stored physically. 4:40 There are not 10^4677 books there are 10^4677 possible pages. From the website: "It contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10^4677 books" 7:15 I forgot to mention it is all 8 note *12 beat* meldoies. 10:31 The time to complete its sort is O(N) to infinity since it requires some amount of time to shuffle once even if it seems instant to us. Sorry. Philosophically the concept described in this video is sound, but there are some details that can cause problems (some which just come down to interpretations of certain word choices) with some of the claims made in this video concerning the mechanics of the websites themselves. One such example is this post on the subreddit for the library of babel. www.reddit.com/r/BabelForum/comments/vph7p3/a_long_dive_into_the_algorithm_some_math_stupid/
@@therealwisemysticaltree there are also 288 paintings that combine to form a video of me morphing into a crab, and the background is just a picture of a chrome window
Imagine procrastinating doing your 3-page paper assignment, scrolling through the library and then you find a perfect match to the assignment within one of the books and just turning that in.
Imagine scrolling through the slideshow of the image library of babel and then just finding a picture of you literally as you are sat there staring at the screen
Imagine scrolling through the slideshow of the image library of babel and then just finding a picture of a joke you haven't told anyone yet, but now cannot take credit to.
@@Ai.Mi_5-25 imagine scrolling through the ACTUAL library of babel and finding the message “the end of times is upon us , you are unlucky to find this message “
Thing is, there's not just one such picture in it, but several thousands. It's just that for all but one some minor detail is off, like the color of one pixel somewhere in the corner is not exactly right or the eye color is wrong. And imagine all the pictures of yourself sitting in front of your screen with someone standing right behind you. It could be anyone, literally.
Waiting "good" art to appear on Canvas of Babel is like expecting"complex life" emerging from nothing. You can still find some globs of color there and there, just like aminoacids form on the natural environment
@@ElementalAer It's obviously fake, the proof is the image search feature: It's not finding a picture identical to yours it's just taking your picture and putting a random number on it. The amount of time and resources it would take to find any specific image is more than anyone has right now.
I think from a standpoint it's really telling that a website full of every possible way to make art is practically useless because it doesn't have an aim. Art is truly filled by necessity of the artist
Even better: The "impressive" thing about the machine itself is entirely man-made, too. In function, abilities and effect it is an entirely unimpressive basic program. And in theory, a guy with infinite pieces of paper and a pencil could do the same. It might take 10.000x longer, but that is of 0 consequence anyway.
It's futile at best. I think the internet has some marvelous things to someone who wants to knowledge, but things like this are just a big waste of time..
This feels like the setup to a creepypasta, where the protagonist does stumble across something meaningful, but horrifying (like a photo of his death or something).
As someone who often dives into the creepypasta wikia (which, i swear, has a very decent level of standard for most of the works that are edited by the mods), that plot point has already been covered so many times. Man finds predictive thing -> man either tries to avoid it or pushes themselves towards that reality -> it happens but not how one expected it to happen, or the predictive thing was a result of him trying to prevent it
How is the viewer supposed to know that the image they see is how they die? Just because it depicts them dying does not mean that is how they will die. If the viewer believes that the image is an accurate depiction of their future, they are paranoid. Although it is certainly possible the picture is accurate, it is extraordinarily unlikely.
@@taylorphillips7030 im not sure you fully understand the concept of the video yet mate. It's not saying that whatever you see in it will predict your future or whatever, it's saying that absolutely no matter what happens in your future, a photo of it will exist in the archive, albeit very unlikely to be found at all
@Pyxyty I'm not sure you fully understand my comment. I'm saying for the setup originally posed the person who sees a meaningful photo of their death would have to believe that they are actually seeing their death. Of course, because a random picture depicting a plausible cause of death for someone is not predictive(it has no intrinsic menaing), any person who sees themselves dying would understand it is unlikely they die it that way. Thus, the setup for the story doesn't work.
@@saddlebag Perhaps I was using certain stylistic devices to make my comment seem funny, to apeal to the masses. So that they may fuel my ego with imaginary likes which are meaningless and barely have any purpose, like the rest of our existence.
@@aduckwithgrapes9572 Lucky you the instructions to finding the instructions to finding the algorithm actually does exist. Take a wild shot in the dark on where it is.
I mean, there are instructions to find the algorithm, and instructions to find the instructions, and instructions to find those, on and on and on, which means there should be an unimaginably large number of these instruction books. But there’s also an unimaginably large number of false algorithms and false paths. Or instructions for an algorithm, but it’s written in a language we won’t invent for 400 years, or a language we never will invent.
The first time I encountered this concept was actually on the never-ending story book(which the film is based on) in which people who forgot how to tell stories throw dices with random letters in order until they get something sensible, and their caretaker explains that at some point they would get every story, every combination of words possible, which is why they keep playing. It kind of speaks to that Idea of art existing with meaning inherently, otherwise it's just an simulation of it, and I always found that particular scene very harrowing (the book's context helps, but on its own its something that always stuck with me)
The Never-ending Story was probably one of the few books that defined my outlook on the world, I must've been around 12 when I read it. I should probably re-read it as a form of self-reflection.
i feel the need to point out that searching for the “secret to immortality” in these libraries isn’t just pointless because the chance of finding something coherent is so small, but because there isn’t a filter for truth. these libraries contain secrets, yes, but they don’t *know* anything. even with a hypothetical coherency filter, you will come across a million lies before you ever find the truth, and you have no way of telling them apart.
Also since the adresses are as long as the books, these libraries just don't contain information, if you learn where a book is, you would be better off learning the content of the book instead
It’s much more accurate to say that the library could potentially *generate* “secrets”, or just coherent text in general, as nothing is actually stored and none of the pages or images you view on the site actually existed prior to you clicking on the page number - which is really just the seed used to generate whatever you’re looking at. Of course, the same is true for any random number generator that spews out strings of ascii text. It’s like how Minecraft or No Man’s Sky generates worlds on the fly as you explore them, rather then storing every possible result of it’s procedural generation algorithm which would be impossible. The existence of the library as a physical space that contains information is really just an illusion, just as Minecraft gives you the illusion of an infinite world - when in reality nothing about the current world you’re viewing actually exists outside what has already been generated.
What’s crazy is that not only does the library or canvas contain every possible image or book you can think of, it also contains infinite incorrect but close variations. There’s works of Shakespeare that were never written, some with a single word off and others with completely different second acts, out of which some are complete gibberish and others are more masterful than the original. There is every picture ever taken of you, and then there’s a version of each one where you are holding any animal you can think of as a pet. There are complete histories of the world, and most, in fact all but a minuscule handful of them tell the history of a world other than our earth or an alternate version of it.
But it is very likely nobody would ever find it. The chances are so incredibly small, that even if you spent your entire life looking for a coherent image or book, you probably wouldn't find it.
@@Kwidge- probably is an overestimation. if earth's entire population went out looking for a single coherent image or book, id bet we might find like 2 images and maybe just maybe a singular chapter of a book, but even that seems way out of reach
@@purpl3grape depends on the material, usually no, but also just intent. accidentally calling a private line is fine, but having an illegal file on your pc will be hard to explain
@@purpl3grape In some cases the answer is yes, assuming that you have the sensory information to understand what you just generated is illegal. For example, if you accidentally generated mature content showing a not adult and had the vision to view the content, then you just did something illegal. As for proving that it was randomly generated and getting away with it in court, you'll be out of luck in this scenario.
Ok so now imagine: The kitchen of Babel. It contains every flavor, that could ever be made. And it resides in the Palace of Babel. A palace with every single room that could ever exist, these rooms having every single concept that could ever be made.
I like this so called “Palace of Babel” Does it reside in the City of Babel? Is it on Babel Street? Is it located in the Country of Babel? Is there a Babble Planet? Babble Universe? Can I visit Babbleland in Babblefornia or Babbleworld in Babblorida? Is there a Babblething that holds the entirety of everything that could ever exist ever? But what if it holds another babblething in it? Is it holding two infinities or just twice the amount of possible things? Is it holding infinite infinities? How the babble does that work? Babblebabblebabblebabble
@@thisisbetterthanmyprevious6674 As a matter of fact, yes. The Palace of Babel resides in the City of Babel and is located on Babel Street. But even if they share the "Babel" part of the name, only the Palace has "Babel properties".
For a very brief time, because some of those rooms must contain big lumps of uncontained neutronium, or jupiter-mass black holes, or cartoonish mad scientists who are just about to test out their new doomsday device.
@Samueli Marinko That should be in the room with a bunch of perfume bottles (pretty sure some of them are deadly so make sure to read the labels if you're gonna smell one of them)
Every once in a while I take a selfie or some other random picture of something I own and then search it on the canvas of Babel. It’s pretty trippy to draw a picture, take a picture of yourself with the picture, and find it already existed somewhere somehow
Also does this mean that the Canvas of Babel owns every NFT to a specific resolution? Technically it existed at the start of time as the properties of space, it is weird when the rights to something is claimed between two parts of one object
I remember getting introduced to the Library of Babel in a DONG! vid from like seven years ago. The concept has always fascinated me, and you really hit me with the line "How can we train an algorithm to recognize meaning?" because it really highlights just how far AI has to go before it has actually attained sentience. DALL-E can only create a meaningful image from a human source, it cannot create it's own input, or it's own meaning, like we do.
But do we really create our own meaning? Everything Dall-E makes is based fundamentally on everything else it has ever seen, and yet our memory is no different. If you had no senses, and were effectively only a brain running random impulses with no stimuli, that would be your entire reality. You would be unable to comprehend anything else. All "meaning" humans create is just the sum total of everything we've ever seen + the stimuli we are currently experiencing. Artificial intelligence does not mean "fake" intelligence, it is simply man-made. It functions basically the same as we do, only on a somewhat lower level.
It's a really interesting question to ask. We've always had trouble defining sentience in regards to living things, but to understand how/if a computer discerns meaning we really need to understand how we do it ourselves. A computer can draw meaning or appear to draw meaning from acting on some bunch of inputs in some format if we teach it to, but how is that different from how we see the world?
@@nox8600 I work with machine learning so I only know how actual brains can be compared to fake brains, but from my understanding all our brains are doing is taking in a big ol bunch of inputs like nerves & light receptors and interpreting all that by activating neurons in some way (I'm sure it's way more complex than that though). An artificial neural network essentially does the same thing only instead of nerves & cells it's pretty much just numbers. The simplest form of neural network will essentially take all those numbers, apply a bunch of operations to them & spit out some output. DALL-E is just an algorithm that takes a text input and *does some stuff* then outputs some image that is thinks is related to the text you gave it, based on learning from examples created by humans. Which to me doesn't seem so different to what our brains are doing all the time when we see things or try to create our own art. (DALL-E is definitely super complex though and I probably didnt do it justice here)
I've been waiting for you to cover this, it's easily one of the most existential websites out there. For anyone thinking you can find some sort of future images or predictions using it, the chances of you even finding anything remotely coherent within your lifetime is indescribably miniscule. There are several hoxes floating around on the dedicated subreddit, but no one has ever confirmed having found a full image (at least to my knowledge).
Has there ever been anything remotely different from random found? Like a patch of similar colors or a line? I’m expecting not, but the chances of like ten pixels being the same next to each other is nowhere near as unreachable as a full image.
Right on. Worse, though : For anyone thinking you can find some sort of future images or predictions using it, even if you DO find a coherent image, you won't know if it's an image of (a) the future, (b) the past, (c) a future that could have been but won't because of something that's already happened, (d) a future that you should do everything in your power to prevent, (e) from a time-and-place in the universe you cannot reach because of the speed limit of light, (f) from an alternative universe altogether, (g) someone's fever dream, (h) etc. Nothing constrains even the coherent images to having any relationship to anything else at all.
As much as I miss his old DeviantArt videos, I still love and follow his channel after 3-4 years because his videos no matter what they're about are always still so entertaining to watch Thank you for your hard work, solar! ^^
Same here! I used to watch his old videos because I thought they were funny, but now the videos are genuinely captivating. I enjoy every one of them because he makes them sound interesting. I swear, he should teach a history class and I would gladly take it.
Technically, the library of babel contains an infinite amount of information if you choose to read it differently. For example, there is a book in the library of babel which provides the code for a more complex library. There's a book which describes a set of books which collectively contain many times more information than a single book could hold. In fact, every book is meaningful depending on the language you use. It's just that most of those books are written in languages that no one has ever, or will ever, think up. It just makes the point, information is quite complex, and is more in how we interpret things rather than the things themselves, at least until we get into quantum physics and the nature of the universe itself in which case information is fundamental, but while the rules are very specific and rigid, it's also very complex, so I'm not going to get into it.
Uhhh technically no that is not true, the secret libraries or books that take you to other books just present knowledge that is already in the library of babel in a new way. Same information still
@Cutie Cry I am not sure. I study physics but I am far from an expert in abstract math. But I believe the OP is referencing different levels of infinity. She is saying that there is a reference somewhere in the Library of Babel to another set of books which can not be contained in the Library of Babel because they exist on a different level of infinity and are too large. (Or you could say another dimension if you like.) This other set of books would fill the entire library of babel and most of it would still be missing. I can't think of a concrete example of how this might actually happen, but I believe she's right.
Have you read the sci-fi novel "Permutation City"? It has an idea similar to what you are describing. Except with an additional twist: what if there is a simulation of a conscious being contained in that book?
Something that I would like to point out, as the Library of Babel is one of my personal favorite ideas: It is actually not difficult to locate Shakespeare within the Library of Babel, at least not if the Library is organized. It is astronomically unlikely to randomly pull shakespeare from the shelves, but it is fully possible to find it if you are looking for it. It is proposed, if the Library is sorted, that to find a book within the Library is no different than having written it yourself. And this is also where the primary issue of that person declaring we must seek "The secret of immortality" comes from. Because the secret to immortality is certainly within the Library. As are 26 copies of the secret of immortality where the 'o' in 'of' is replaced with another letter. Along with another thousand copies where the primary ingredient to immortality is replaced with a different ordinary object or noble substance. To find meaning in The Library Of Babel, You must have already decided what means something to you.
@@mys_mistree What you just proposed is literally just a regular library. Having the means to sort the Library of Babel defeats the whole point of the idea. As for what Gerydome proposed, they're on the right track for machine-learning algorithms. They just need to refine the algorithm far enough so that it starts generating paragraphs of sentences related to each other that contain no meaningless duplicates where each paragraph adds meaning and value to the overall article(or page in a book).
@@aikslf I didn't know your local library is infinite. That sounds pretty dope. And it wasn't the means to sort it, it was pre sorted. Though searching for meaning in Babel is nonetheless the same as writing the book you find yourself.
5:16 I love the idea of finding a door to the library of babel, opening it, and then just having the Blue Screen of Death appear to everyone including yourself
:( The universe ran into a problem and needs to restart. We're just collecting some error info, and then we'll restart for you. 0% complete [eldritch horror here] For more information about this issue and possible fixes, ask for the stop code book at the library If you call a support person, give them this info: Stop code: POINT_FLEW_AWAY
It seems like a lot of these thought experiments are themselves the art. They're elegantly executed and thought-provoking in their narrative form. The core idea isn't really that sophisticated; you could easily dumb it down to just "if a guy lived forever he would inevitably do everything." But these thought experiments instead utilize romantic settings of libraries, and the haunting spectre of cold, calculating machines, to evoke deep feelings about the random pointlessness of the universe, the infinite nature of time, free will, and other heady concepts. But lightly disguised as a practical, good-faith effort to just "see if we can." This seems like a whole fascinating genre of meta-art... kind of reminds me a bit of that organ that's set up to play a single song over the course of 1,000 years or something. I forget if that was in an earlier Solar Sands video. It would be cool to see more videos about meta-art projects of this sort!
Literally took the words straight out of my head, except 1000% more detailed and sophisticated than whatever I could have said. Considering how this comment isn't even that complicated that says something.
Everything within the universe is quantified and limited. Be that time, space, energy states or whatever you can imagine. So we can have things that are unlikely to the point that we can just assume it won't happen.
"The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material." ― Michelangelo
I would refer the library, canvas, and audio library of babel to be their own artworks with meaning within themselves, they're interesting, and have a profound message behind them.
I love how these projects all use the same title "of babel" Because when you think about it, its like the tower of Babel, not in the sense that it reaches up to heaven, but rather that it results in mostly gibberish that people need to find meaning in.
As a musician, I always fear that what I’m playing will somehow have already been created even though I’ve never heard it. It IS possible to accidentally make a song somebody already has made.
One way to avoid the issue is to tune your instrument of choice to be way off key with normal even temperament tuning. Once the ear gets used to everything being off by a few cents, it'll sound normal, at least until you hear a regular song again.
Too late. Someone did the same thing that's on this video, but with music. Every note combination possible is contained in this. So whatever you compose, it has already been made.
@@NachtFaenger Ive seen the video on that and they said that their algorithm still had limitations and was limited to mostly western scales, etc. so it’s still possible to find something new don’t be discouraged
I'd have thought that it would be affirming and not dreadful that others have done what you have before you. Everything we do is inspired by our own influences, so to find others who have walked that path before for whatever reasons is inspiring. Given the fact that music has no ceiling, it shows us how we'd diverge from what others have done. Also given the fact that everything we do is influenced in some form by the external world, there's the argument that you should use audio piracy as a compositional prerogative.
I feel like the thing about the library of babel is not that it takes too long to get a meaningful text, but let’s say to find out how to become immortal, there will be many books which tell you how to become immortal, but only one will be correct, and the others will tell you to eat dirt and piss from the window. You would already have to know how to become immortal to be able to say that this book says the truth. When there is no real information given into something, you can’t get any out of it.
Doesn't it follow, than, that no monkey could EVER type out Shakespeare, no matter how long it had to do it, b/c it could never do it to begin with? I think so. Also, wouldn't it point to the idea that one cannot 'redeem' one's self from a fallen and ignorant condition unless a wise and free one is leading the way? I think Man is helpless without God.
Can we take a minute to appreciate the effort put into this video? Whenever I come here I learn something new. I don't know man, I feel lucky to be able to access this for free. Cheers from Brazil!
I’ve given this some thought, and it still never ceases to amaze me. Somewhere in that library are the secrets to technologies yet uninvented, an unwritten screenplay whose film will make you cry 10 years from now, and formulas for medicines that could could save millions of people. And yet, even at our fingertips, it’s just all out of reach, surrounded by exobytes of random trash and so many near-misses and bad versions, as you say. It’s an odd thought that ever piece of media ever created from the formation of this library - every masterpiece - was not just crafted but was in a sense “discovered” as a jewel among the dross, since it already exists somewhere. And yet there is no way to find it until it has been created.
@@andrewsauer9669 Literally and that's what most people in this comment section don't understand. Anything in this world does not exist until you arrange it a certain way but it needs you
This video feels longer than 12 minutes, but in a good way. Like there's so much contained in it that my brain has to slow down to take it all in, making time feel slower.
_This_ is the kind of thing I love Just the _idea_ that you could find something meaningful and absolutely live changing, but the _astronomically_ high odds that you'll actually find it Depressing in a way, but absolutely fascinating
The odds are high because there's no way to know what you're looking for. It's way easier to find something meaningful and life-changing if you have an aim. Is that comforting?
I once dreamt of the canvas of babel, but it was a map. Each pixel represented an area the size of our universe. My vision started off very close, so close that I could only see the one pixel representing our observable universe, but then I silently floated back into the unknown. Before me was an incomprehensible tapestry that represented everything, one that still haunts me till this date
The creator of the site is currently moving, since the site is self-hosted on his own servers, it is unavailable until the move is complete. He said on Reddit that he currently expects August 12 or later for when it will all be up and running again.
As a computer scientist these things are really interesting to me. It reminds me of the π filesystem. Since all digital files are essentially sequences of numbers (hence the name digital) it is possible to find an offset in the infinite decimal digits of Pi where any digital file you can comprehend exists. This means you don't need hard drives to store data, the data you want to store is baked into mathematics so you just need to store the offset in the digits of Pi that your file resides and the size of the file so you know how many digits to read. The issue with this is that the offset to find any particular file is almost certainly larger than the file itself so it's completely impractical. You can do the same thing with any irrational number.
That's super interesting, hadn't thought about it. Infinities really are strange. If we extend this idea to literally just information instead of files, wouldn't that mean that pi (if it truly is infinite and random) contains... all that there is? For example, there should be some substring of numbers in the pi-sequence that translates exactly to an ASCII-encoded text describing the entire history and future of the universe.
@@GS-tk1hk And probably many more describing it incorrectly, you won't know what's true until you've confirmed it (What if you are wrong?) or it has happened
@@natsudragneelthefiredragon Indeed, most definitely many more that are either plain wrong, or got a tiny detail wrong. And all of this is drowned in vast oceans of pure noise without any meaning at all. But the fact still stands, it's still in there, *somewhere*, hiding inside the ratio between a circles circumference and diameter... isn't that kinda mindblowing?
@@GS-tk1hk The human imagination does have limits though, what if the answer is something we simply can't describe? Especially in the library of Babel, having page limits means that some things like the secret to immortality and the history of the universe might not even exist in there, or be very incomplete potentially It is mindblowing though, it's amazing.... Yet completely useless at the same time, to prove a point
I love this concept. I thought about it a few days. There was a Steve Brunton video that showed a 20x20 1 bit image... Having more information than the universe. so I thought about writing a pixel shader to go through all of them. It would require a random bit shift register to never show an image twice. Yes, 2^400 is a massive number. And image space is vast. The key is to create a subset of this space by semantically structuring. Which now exists in plenty of languages models, image decoders etc.
in the SCP world, there's a magical place that connects to every universe called the Wanderer's Library. it's kind of like a more condensed version of the library of babbel in that it contains every text that has ever been written, will ever be written, and many that will never be, but it's all actual text written by someone. Even with its Librarians who can tell you the location of any book, how do you know that what you're reading is true? It's a pretty fascinating concept
Coming up with new stories was so much easier as a kid for me, every idea felt so original back then. I distinctly remember how my comic about a government controlling it's citizens by survellaince seemed like the most revolutionary story ever. Too bad 1984 ripped me off.
I swear that a year ago i wanted to make canvas of babel after hearing about the library of babel, thinking it hasn't been done yet. _I've never had an original thought in my life!_
Sculpture gallery of Babel: Rotating 3D models of every possible shape. If this included shapes with detached parts, including pixel-sized parts, floating in the air, then it would look pretty similar to the Gallery of Babel. If it only included shapes where all parts are connected then there would be a lot of sculptures of multicolored bushes growing out of piles of multicolored gravel. The hard part would be eliminating the 3D models that include disconnected parts.
In a weird way this is one the most inspirational videos I’ve ever seen. Even though that passionate story you’ve been writing for years has already been made, but nobody will find it until you can make it and match it
The video said the only way to find meaning in the images is to make it, which I take as finding meaning only if you create the image, or if you create the meaning. The meaning isn't there to find, but for you to create based on the image.
I really like this. It really reminds me that old tiring argument that "my child could have painted/sung this" Like yeah, anyone could. But none but that author did. Which also reminds me that we should always respect a worker, and always respect a creator.
I really like this. It really reminds me that old tiring argument that "my child could have written this" Like yeah, anyone could. But none but that author did. Which also reminds me that we should always respect a worker, and always respect a creator.
It’s absolutely insane how this is somehow one of the most mind blowing things ever yet somehow is one of the most meaningless. It’s crazy to think how much interesting this is yet somehow is literally useless. The concept itself of infinity fascinates yet scares me
And in one of those pages what you just said is written. Yet in thousands of other pages what you said is altered in some way or even disagreeing with what you’ve put forth for us to read…
@@falklumo it’s the closest you can get to something that is real “infinite” though on a human lifespan scale. But yes that’s true in a universal scale
A funny thing about the library of babel and the canvas of babel is that in the library there is a page with words "an image of this page with a stray pixel in coordinates x and z" and there is always an image for that in the canvas of babel. The infinite possibilities of infinity. Funny, beautiful and scary at the same time.
My biggest fear ever since I was a child was being granted immortality, but damned to sort through an infinite amount of information, all with zero contact with anyone. This video is definitely living rent-free in the back of my mind now.
I find it sort of crazy that somewhere out there, there is a sequence of images in the image library of Babel that perfectly matches this videos, as well as the full script for this video in the text library of Babel. Maybe even the voiceover if there's an audio version that isn't just melodies.
“Meaning makes art”. That’s a great quote. I’ve often wondered what could be considered art now that we have AI generated imagery that could be considered art. I’d love to see a whole video dedicated to this topic
a couple years ago after learning about the Library of Babel I threw out some theories with my dad about a hypothetical "Gallery of Babel" containing every possible image on a 1080p canvas, so you can figure that naturally this video piqued my curiosity haha
The seed thing shows that it is effectively like guessing an encryption key, the encryptor generates what can only be considered useless noise unless you get the numbers just right, then it forms an image
a short number vs 10^961755, assuming random distribution and no reverse engineering it's far less likely to get an cohesive image, ever, than to randomly smash keyboard and get a PGP private key for a certain public key on the first try ...
While you were talking about Bogosort and the impossible yet alluring odds, how it's the same as the lottery, I couldn't help but think of another of Borges' short stories, The Lottery in Babylon, where he talks about this exact thing, how we both find and are stripped of meaning by randomness and chance.
I think the Library of Babel and other such concepts illustrate an all-too-common fundamental misunderstanding of information. Turning the abstract phase-space of possibilities into a physical archive of every possible permutation is less than worthless. Far from being a font of knowledge and meaning, the Library of Babel buries anything and everything useful under literal mountains of gibberish. You would still have to search for meaningful information, and the only effective way to do that is to write that information yourself, leaving you no better off than you would be without it. I think it also serves as a good metaphor for finding meaning in life. Life itself has no fundamental meaning, being essentially a product of random chance. If we want our lives to have any meaning, we all end up having to make it for ourselves one way or another.
People think that the library of babel contains meaningful texts... but only when someone reads then, the reader themself will give it some meaning. I also don't like calling it a library at all... it's like saying the fibonacci algorythm is a book containing all fibonacci numbers.
the way you ended this video sorta reminded me of this quote i like from the owl house: “look kid, everyone wants to believe they're ‘chosen,’ but if we all waited around for a prophecy to make us special, we'd die waiting. and that's why you need to choose yourself.”
this made me recall a dadaist poem i read one time in a course about the avant garde- it was nonsense, but was meant to evoke some meaning through the melodic texture of the sounds when being spoken aloud, some of the nonsense words’ proximity to real words, and the connotation of rambling/senselessness with trauma from wwi. That is to say, an algorithim wouldnt be able to detect meaning in that, even though its a poem i still read, enjoyed, and wrote a paper about more than 100 years after it was written.
@@ivandriggs9077 its called karawane (the german word for caravan) by hugo ball. haha, i had to go searching through my old papers from college to find the name again
“The only way you find meaningful art in these libraries, is by making it yourself,” he said, with such confidence, not quite realizing what he inspired. Just think of it, everything that can ever exist, has ever existed, and does exist, all in an imaginary space. All at my fingertips. The entire collective of time, and I hold the key: my simple cell phone, product of fellow humans. Me and them the products of untold generations born from dead stars. Thank you solar sands, I truly am lucky. :)
you should have mentioned one of the most interesting aspects of the library: for every book of gibberish, there is another book somewhere that contains a cryptographic key that can translate the first book into meaningful language.
I don't think this fact is at all interesting given how it is trivially true. In fact, there exists an infinite amount of cryptographic keys for every book since you can simply define the cryptograph function as "add the values of the characters together, as defined by their places in the alphabet".
Yeah the whole idea of "meaning" kind of breaks down when you think about the library of babel for too long. Technically _any_ book in the library could have _any_ meaning if you "decrypt" it the right way
I've had this interesting idea of a kind of video game of babel. Imagine, if upon booting up the game, it would randomly snatch a ton of assets from the unity store or something, randomly generate text as code, and then compile that code and assets in some kind of virtual machine. It would literally never even boot up, but its interesting to me. What if it did? What could it make?
There’s an application for Doom called Obsidian that just generates random maps. What I find interesting is that there’s a chance you’ll just generate the original Doom maps.
Putting Aphex Twin music (specifically: Selected Ambient Works Volume II) is the greatest idea of all; Aphex Twin’s music is like the full combination of every note to ever exist, Druqs’s a great example of this, so many song, so very distinct from each other; Avril 14th, the piano notes being so relaxing and sad in some way, compared to Afx.237 v7; A noisy like singing combined with lasers all over the song can take thousands, but millions of years to analyze every single note on Aphex Twin’s works.
2:02 is so important to understand. By its nature, this library contains many miraculous things. But it contains so many more false, destructive, malicious, and meaningless things. This archive encodes every digit of pi in its images, and that library encodes every digit of pi in its books as well. That library contains this very post, along with a million copies each with 1 typo, and trillions with 2 typos, etcetera. All in a section you could call "the ferociousfeind on the library of babel compendium", but good luck finding it.
@@cara-seyun the search function isn't omnipotent either. You can search for patterns, sure, but you can only search for information you already have. Effectively the search algorithm is finding where your data is already held in the massive library, but you cannot search for "the cure to cancer" and get anything other than lip service, or gibberish with the words "the cure for cancer" somewhere coincidentally in there
@@magnusp25 no, the library contains every string of digits however many digits long, so you can reconstruct the entirety of pi by putting together the books in some order, repeats allowed. You can construct the entirety of pi out of the finite parts of the library of babel, out of a ridiculously small subset of the library of babel even, the books that are entirely digits and contain no letters or punctuation (except for the first one which starts "3.14.....")
As someone who is VERY familiar with the Library of Babel, it is very interesting that they created a subsection for images! It is also worth mentioning that, just like the Library of Babel, entire documents aren't bound to only one image! Each frame could contain only a fraction of an image, and collecting all of them can make a higher resolution picture, with all the details you can ever imagine.
That's actually crazy to think about. For all we know these seemingly random images can just be an atomically small part of a way larger image and infact you aren't looking at just random pixels on the screen
It is pretty spooky tho, to know that as soon as you have created a piece of work, whether that be written or an image, you can immediately go to the library of babel or the canvas of babel and find that it was always there, just waiting to be found. Though I guess in a way, it's more special that that work was created by a human with intention, vs a computer program that brute forced its way through an infinite series to get to that image that couldn't even be found anyway before it was created first by human hands.
this is an excellent video in general, and as a small insignificant detail, i also really appreciate the aphex twin in the soundtrack. was lovely and unexpected
These Mediums of Bable would be an extremely efficient way for a time traveler to send information to the past. A simple text document could contain coordinates to thousands of pivotal images and scripts. - If only there was some way to send a text message back.
Hey! So this is an interesting idea, but it turns out that it isn't quite right and it's for a reason that I think illuminates how these Archives work. The question is, how long will these coordinates be? If there are N things in the library, we need N different coordinates, because each one specifies a different thing in the library. Assuming these coordinates are numbers in base 2 (binary), we would need at least log_2(N) digits to represent numbers as big as N. But wait, we can apply the same logic to the things themselves. At the end of the day, images and sound and such are represented using binary digits, which are just numbers. And so we also need log_2(N) binary digits to represent the things. But this means that the coordinates aren't any more efficient! This might be counterintuitive, but think of it this way - the coordinates are just a different way of encoding the things. You can encode the things using their original representation, as images or sounds or whatever, OR as their coordinates. It's two different ways of encoding the same things. Sort of breaks the magic a bit, but I still think it's cool!
Ah quantum bogosort. One of my first CS professors explained that one to the class. It of course ended with "The rest is left as an exercise to the reader"
YES! ive thought about this site so much, just waiting for someone to find a coherent image randomly that is still random and impossible to take a picture of. since ai image makers however, its less likely to believe when someone does find one.. theres a proposition that every single page in the library of babel has meaning. that somewhere else in the pages lists a way to decode a pages text using the specific encryption algorithm and give its own answers and passages. but codes could be hidden under other codes. this makes every page infinitely longer in its informational usefulness, because somewhere an encryption key exists to decode that page, and that one holds a key to another, and a key may work for multiple, missing that one page would make the entire library useless and still equally as infinite
I like the message towards the end about having to ascribe meaning to art, life, and everything basically. The Canvas of Babel in a way reminds me of Minecraft and its various seeds of seemingly near infinite amounts due to the shear magnitude of possible seeds in a single version, plus the multitude of other versions that add new natural blocks or alter how worlds generate with all of their seeds.
For a machine that finds meaning in the canvas of Babel. You could look at the AI Dall-e 2 as such a machine (given that it uses a different resolution). It starts out with a bunch of random pixels and then slowly adjusts them to get something meaningful, something that represents something other than random noise.
@@SolarSands Actually, it's alot more efficient than doing any other method at this moment, it's really fast and it just gets random pixels from random images in any topic
@@SolarSands Yeah it is called diffusion. To train this model OpenAi used a lot of different images and slowly added noise to them until the images were basically just random pixels and then made the AI recreate the image from the random noise. In turn the AI learned to turn any type of noise step by step into an actual image. This technique is relatively new (that's why there are suddenly so many image generating API's that are popping up). The most popular technique used before were Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). GAN's are trained using two neural networks that are working against eachother. At first there is an AI (the generator) that generates images. This generated image then gets send to the other AI (the discriminator) along with an actual training image and the discriminator will determine which one is the real or fake one. If the discriminator was right the it receives a reward and the generator receives a punishment and vice versa. So the generator will start out making random noise but will eventually learn to make better images. The diffusion approach turned out to be a lot better than the GAN approach for generating images.
Imagine just looking through the Library of Babel and going past detailed instructions to brewing the cure of cancer being written in a form of english that doesnt exist yet
Oh, hey! I have something similar in one of my stories! It's called the Written Forest, and it's a forest with shelves upon shelves of books built into the trees, and in them is everything anyone will ever write. The leaves of the trees are covered in every thought that has ever has or will be thought, and the vines crawling up and down the trees contain every rule and law (universal or not) that has or ever will be created or discovered.
Corrections:
0:00 To be extra extra clear The Library of Babel Website DOES NOT LITERALLY "CONTAIN" AS IN "STORE" EVERYTHING somewhere but it does have the potential to generate everything given enough time, which is nearly indistinguishable to searching through a theoretical library that does have everything stored physically.
4:40 There are not 10^4677 books there are 10^4677 possible pages. From the website: "It contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 10^4677 books"
7:15 I forgot to mention it is all 8 note *12 beat* meldoies.
10:31 The time to complete its sort is O(N) to infinity since it requires some amount of time to shuffle once even if it seems instant to us. Sorry.
Philosophically the concept described in this video is sound, but there are some details that can cause problems (some which just come down to interpretations of certain word choices) with some of the claims made in this video concerning the mechanics of the websites themselves.
One such example is this post on the subreddit for the library of babel. www.reddit.com/r/BabelForum/comments/vph7p3/a_long_dive_into_the_algorithm_some_math_stupid/
Ok
Ok
👍
That's unfortunate timing
Thank you for this.
Don't forget that every frame of this video is also contained inside the library of babel
Every thing you look at will be rasterized and be contained within the canvas of babel.
There are 288 "paintings" on the canvas of babel that when put together make a 12 second video of me morphing into a crab
Your comment is there too
@@DrDunsparce you are there
@@therealwisemysticaltree there are also 288 paintings that combine to form a video of me morphing into a crab, and the background is just a picture of a chrome window
Imagine procrastinating doing your 3-page paper assignment, scrolling through the library and then you find a perfect match to the assignment within one of the books and just turning that in.
And then only one answer turns out correct because there's an equal chance of failing to not failing.
@@derpatel9760 Shrodingers assignment
@@ChappyPalladium if you look at your test paper it either blows up or every correct answer appears
to bad its literally impossible cuz cringy universe
@@ketch10 As somebody who is incredibly good at English, I fainted in death when I saw this spelling.
Imagine scrolling through the slideshow of the image library of babel and then just finding a picture of you literally as you are sat there staring at the screen
Imagine scrolling through the slideshow of the image library of babel and then just finding a picture of a joke you haven't told anyone yet, but now cannot take credit to.
@@Ai.Mi_5-25 imagine scrolling through the ACTUAL library of babel and finding the message “the end of times is upon us , you are unlucky to find this message “
It theoretically possible but probably won't ever happen sadly...
Thing is, there's not just one such picture in it, but several thousands. It's just that for all but one some minor detail is off, like the color of one pixel somewhere in the corner is not exactly right or the eye color is wrong.
And imagine all the pictures of yourself sitting in front of your screen with someone standing right behind you. It could be anyone, literally.
@@karenbenton1503 It would mean nothing.
Waiting for art to appear on babel is like waiting for life to spontaneously start existing
We breathe and eat through the same hole which guarantees a percentage of all humans will die by choking on our own food.
@@NowCircle-e6dcan my food make you choke 👉👈😳
I know right? So dumb lol.
Waiting "good" art to appear on Canvas of Babel is like expecting"complex life" emerging from nothing.
You can still find some globs of color there and there, just like aminoacids form on the natural environment
@@ElementalAer It's obviously fake, the proof is the image search feature:
It's not finding a picture identical to yours it's just taking your picture and putting a random number on it.
The amount of time and resources it would take to find any specific image is more than anyone has right now.
I think from a standpoint it's really telling that a website full of every possible way to make art is practically useless because it doesn't have an aim. Art is truly filled by necessity of the artist
Agreed, emotion is a big part of art and without it things are shallow or just flows of colors.
You might like subjectivity in art by CJ the X
Even better: The "impressive" thing about the machine itself is entirely man-made, too. In function, abilities and effect it is an entirely unimpressive basic program.
And in theory, a guy with infinite pieces of paper and a pencil could do the same. It might take 10.000x longer, but that is of 0 consequence anyway.
It's futile at best. I think the internet has some marvelous things to someone who wants to knowledge, but things like this are just a big waste of time..
Until AI comes in
This feels like the setup to a creepypasta, where the protagonist does stumble across something meaningful, but horrifying (like a photo of his death or something).
"a photo of your death"
spookiest shit. reminds me of THAT scene in lake mungo.
As someone who often dives into the creepypasta wikia (which, i swear, has a very decent level of standard for most of the works that are edited by the mods), that plot point has already been covered so many times.
Man finds predictive thing -> man either tries to avoid it or pushes themselves towards that reality -> it happens but not how one expected it to happen, or the predictive thing was a result of him trying to prevent it
How is the viewer supposed to know that the image they see is how they die? Just because it depicts them dying does not mean that is how they will die. If the viewer believes that the image is an accurate depiction of their future, they are paranoid. Although it is certainly possible the picture is accurate, it is extraordinarily unlikely.
@@taylorphillips7030 im not sure you fully understand the concept of the video yet mate. It's not saying that whatever you see in it will predict your future or whatever, it's saying that absolutely no matter what happens in your future, a photo of it will exist in the archive, albeit very unlikely to be found at all
@Pyxyty I'm not sure you fully understand my comment. I'm saying for the setup originally posed the person who sees a meaningful photo of their death would have to believe that they are actually seeing their death. Of course, because a random picture depicting a plausible cause of death for someone is not predictive(it has no intrinsic menaing), any person who sees themselves dying would understand it is unlikely they die it that way. Thus, the setup for the story doesn't work.
He really used Bloons TD music when talking about the infinite monkey theorem.
I should be mad, but I am entertained.
Why… exactly should you be mad? It’s good music, and not just within the context of the game.
@@saddlebag angry in the same way you get mad at a "good" pun
@@saddlebag Perhaps I was using certain stylistic devices to make my comment seem funny, to apeal to the masses.
So that they may fuel my ego with imaginary likes which are meaningless and barely have any purpose, like the rest of our existence.
LOL I didn't even catch that
@@Gloomdrake Oh wait, I totally missed that pun.
It’s crazy how it could just go from gibberish to the most profound image you’ve ever seen in a second and then back to gibberish.
The algorithm you described that can accurately sort the meaningful from the gibberish in the babel archives is, annoyingly, also inside the archives.
"Well, at least we have the instructions to find it"
"thats in the archives too"
"Frick"
@@aduckwithgrapes9572 Lucky you the instructions to finding the instructions to finding the algorithm actually does exist. Take a wild shot in the dark on where it is.
that is only if the algorithm is possible. So if you think about it the babel archives cannot contain everything.
I mean, there are instructions to find the algorithm, and instructions to find the instructions, and instructions to find those, on and on and on, which means there should be an unimaginably large number of these instruction books.
But there’s also an unimaginably large number of false algorithms and false paths.
Or instructions for an algorithm, but it’s written in a language we won’t invent for 400 years, or a language we never will invent.
@@cara-seyun there is also infinite languages and so every book in the library technically contains the algorithm in some sort of language
The first time I encountered this concept was actually on the never-ending story book(which the film is based on) in which people who forgot how to tell stories throw dices with random letters in order until they get something sensible, and their caretaker explains that at some point they would get every story, every combination of words possible, which is why they keep playing.
It kind of speaks to that Idea of art existing with meaning inherently, otherwise it's just an simulation of it, and I always found that particular scene very harrowing (the book's context helps, but on its own its something that always stuck with me)
The Never-ending Story was probably one of the few books that defined my outlook on the world, I must've been around 12 when I read it. I should probably re-read it as a form of self-reflection.
does the library of babel not work for anyone else or is it just me?
@@אלוןשיינפלד check the pinned comment, it's offline for a few days
i feel the need to point out that searching for the “secret to immortality” in these libraries isn’t just pointless because the chance of finding something coherent is so small, but because there isn’t a filter for truth. these libraries contain secrets, yes, but they don’t *know* anything.
even with a hypothetical coherency filter, you will come across a million lies before you ever find the truth, and you have no way of telling them apart.
Well you'll have to make a leap of faith and rely on your good buddy luck once again.
Also since the adresses are as long as the books, these libraries just don't contain information, if you learn where a book is, you would be better off learning the content of the book instead
I suppose humans could live a lot longer than they do now, and the answer to that one would probably be found with humans, not a random book.
To achieve immortality you need to find the book, but to find the book you need immortality.
It’s much more accurate to say that the library could potentially *generate* “secrets”, or just coherent text in general, as nothing is actually stored and none of the pages or images you view on the site actually existed prior to you clicking on the page number - which is really just the seed used to generate whatever you’re looking at. Of course, the same is true for any random number generator that spews out strings of ascii text. It’s like how Minecraft or No Man’s Sky generates worlds on the fly as you explore them, rather then storing every possible result of it’s procedural generation algorithm which would be impossible.
The existence of the library as a physical space that contains information is really just an illusion, just as Minecraft gives you the illusion of an infinite world - when in reality nothing about the current world you’re viewing actually exists outside what has already been generated.
Can't wait until someone does "Bad Apple but in the canvas of Babel"
Underated comment
Who is gonna tell him ?
@@Defaultnames yeah i know it would be the exact same thing but it would still be cool
@@martic1465that's not his point it's litterally IN the video
@@AllmightyGigachadthats the library i meant the canvas
What’s crazy is that not only does the library or canvas contain every possible image or book you can think of, it also contains infinite incorrect but close variations. There’s works of Shakespeare that were never written, some with a single word off and others with completely different second acts, out of which some are complete gibberish and others are more masterful than the original. There is every picture ever taken of you, and then there’s a version of each one where you are holding any animal you can think of as a pet. There are complete histories of the world, and most, in fact all but a minuscule handful of them tell the history of a world other than our earth or an alternate version of it.
Actually, an infinite amount of them tell the story of our Earth and then some.
@@RGC_animation there still is a finite amount of books in total
And to think that even that is nothing compared to infinity
But it is very likely nobody would ever find it. The chances are so incredibly small, that even if you spent your entire life looking for a coherent image or book, you probably wouldn't find it.
@@Kwidge- probably is an overestimation. if earth's entire population went out looking for a single coherent image or book, id bet we might find like 2 images and maybe just maybe a singular chapter of a book, but even that seems way out of reach
It has the same vibes as "I know every phone number, just don't know which person it belongs to"
Can someone be incriminated for randomly generating illegal material?
@@purpl3grape depends on the material, usually no, but also just intent. accidentally calling a private line is fine, but having an illegal file on your pc will be hard to explain
@Henrique | He went there.
@@purpl3grape In some cases the answer is yes, assuming that you have the sensory information to understand what you just generated is illegal. For example, if you accidentally generated mature content showing a not adult and had the vision to view the content, then you just did something illegal. As for proving that it was randomly generated and getting away with it in court, you'll be out of luck in this scenario.
@Henrique so long as its not stored its fine, and also as long as it wasnt manipulated in same way to produce said image
Ok so now imagine: The kitchen of Babel.
It contains every flavor, that could ever be made. And it resides in the Palace of Babel. A palace with every single room that could ever exist, these rooms having every single concept that could ever be made.
I like this so called “Palace of Babel”
Does it reside in the City of Babel?
Is it on Babel Street?
Is it located in the Country of Babel?
Is there a Babble Planet?
Babble Universe?
Can I visit Babbleland in Babblefornia or Babbleworld in Babblorida?
Is there a Babblething that holds the entirety of everything that could ever exist ever?
But what if it holds another babblething in it?
Is it holding two infinities or just twice the amount of possible things?
Is it holding infinite infinities?
How the babble does that work?
Babblebabblebabblebabble
@@thisisbetterthanmyprevious6674 As a matter of fact, yes. The Palace of Babel resides in the City of Babel and is located on Babel Street. But even if they share the "Babel" part of the name, only the Palace has "Babel properties".
For a very brief time, because some of those rooms must contain big lumps of uncontained neutronium, or jupiter-mass black holes, or cartoonish mad scientists who are just about to test out their new doomsday device.
@@vylbird8014 Fortunately, Babel properties make these rooms' effects contained
@Samueli Marinko That should be in the room with a bunch of perfume bottles (pretty sure some of them are deadly so make sure to read the labels if you're gonna smell one of them)
Every once in a while I take a selfie or some other random picture of something I own and then search it on the canvas of Babel. It’s pretty trippy to draw a picture, take a picture of yourself with the picture, and find it already existed somewhere somehow
why is no one talking about this
@@tamastasi428 because it isnt correct. its smoke and mirrors
The website is clearly fake.. it just uses JavaScript and adds effects to the image and creates a code that never existed
you know its fake, right?
@@wyvrnres I've known these websites have been fake since day one
Also does this mean that the Canvas of Babel owns every NFT to a specific resolution? Technically it existed at the start of time as the properties of space, it is weird when the rights to something is claimed between two parts of one object
omg yes
But is it on the blockchain? The Blockchain doesn’t lie.
@@lithunoisan Space came before the blockchain.
Checkmate, atheists.
“Guys the canvas of Babel screenshotted my nft I don’t think it’s allowed to do that😡 Muskie is gonna head about this!!!”
Nft bros get the library shut down
Put the canvas on shuffle and wait for it to play out this entire video with all the frames in the right order and the cycle will be complete
And do the same with the audio library of babel
I remember getting introduced to the Library of Babel in a DONG! vid from like seven years ago. The concept has always fascinated me, and you really hit me with the line "How can we train an algorithm to recognize meaning?" because it really highlights just how far AI has to go before it has actually attained sentience. DALL-E can only create a meaningful image from a human source, it cannot create it's own input, or it's own meaning, like we do.
But do we really create our own meaning? Everything Dall-E makes is based fundamentally on everything else it has ever seen, and yet our memory is no different. If you had no senses, and were effectively only a brain running random impulses with no stimuli, that would be your entire reality. You would be unable to comprehend anything else. All "meaning" humans create is just the sum total of everything we've ever seen + the stimuli we are currently experiencing. Artificial intelligence does not mean "fake" intelligence, it is simply man-made. It functions basically the same as we do, only on a somewhat lower level.
It's a really interesting question to ask. We've always had trouble defining sentience in regards to living things, but to understand how/if a computer discerns meaning we really need to understand how we do it ourselves. A computer can draw meaning or appear to draw meaning from acting on some bunch of inputs in some format if we teach it to, but how is that different from how we see the world?
Would you clarify the difference?
@@nox8600 I work with machine learning so I only know how actual brains can be compared to fake brains, but from my understanding all our brains are doing is taking in a big ol bunch of inputs like nerves & light receptors and interpreting all that by activating neurons in some way (I'm sure it's way more complex than that though). An artificial neural network essentially does the same thing only instead of nerves & cells it's pretty much just numbers. The simplest form of neural network will essentially take all those numbers, apply a bunch of operations to them & spit out some output.
DALL-E is just an algorithm that takes a text input and *does some stuff* then outputs some image that is thinks is related to the text you gave it, based on learning from examples created by humans. Which to me doesn't seem so different to what our brains are doing all the time when we see things or try to create our own art.
(DALL-E is definitely super complex though and I probably didnt do it justice here)
@@The9garr thanks!
the bloons music starting the second you started talking about monkeys was a stroke of genius
legit
I've been waiting for you to cover this, it's easily one of the most existential websites out there. For anyone thinking you can find some sort of future images or predictions using it, the chances of you even finding anything remotely coherent within your lifetime is indescribably miniscule. There are several hoxes floating around on the dedicated subreddit, but no one has ever confirmed having found a full image (at least to my knowledge).
Has there ever been anything remotely different from random found? Like a patch of similar colors or a line? I’m expecting not, but the chances of like ten pixels being the same next to each other is nowhere near as unreachable as a full image.
Right on. Worse, though : For anyone thinking you can find some sort of future images or predictions using it, even if you DO find a coherent image, you won't know if it's an image of (a) the future, (b) the past, (c) a future that could have been but won't because of something that's already happened, (d) a future that you should do everything in your power to prevent, (e) from a time-and-place in the universe you cannot reach because of the speed limit of light, (f) from an alternative universe altogether, (g) someone's fever dream, (h) etc. Nothing constrains even the coherent images to having any relationship to anything else at all.
So what would be the chances of finding an among us.
@@rojastegulu 3% chance
@@CatchThesePaws Not to my knowledge, no. Even a few colored splotches would be momentous.
As much as I miss his old DeviantArt videos, I still love and follow his channel after 3-4 years because his videos no matter what they're about are always still so entertaining to watch
Thank you for your hard work, solar! ^^
Aww, thank you for hearting my comment ^^
iaponias saqartvelo jobia somexo!!!! 💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪
@@dkskcjfjswwwwwws413 Haaa? Kakheli var
Same here! I used to watch his old videos because I thought they were funny, but now the videos are genuinely captivating. I enjoy every one of them because he makes them sound interesting. I swear, he should teach a history class and I would gladly take it.
Went from funny foot fetish ew yuck to giving me a crisis
Technically, the library of babel contains an infinite amount of information if you choose to read it differently. For example, there is a book in the library of babel which provides the code for a more complex library. There's a book which describes a set of books which collectively contain many times more information than a single book could hold. In fact, every book is meaningful depending on the language you use. It's just that most of those books are written in languages that no one has ever, or will ever, think up. It just makes the point, information is quite complex, and is more in how we interpret things rather than the things themselves, at least until we get into quantum physics and the nature of the universe itself in which case information is fundamental, but while the rules are very specific and rigid, it's also very complex, so I'm not going to get into it.
Also we have to consider the fact that the library of babel is kinda impossible since we only use the Roman alphabet. What about the others?
Uhhh technically no that is not true, the secret libraries or books that take you to other books just present knowledge that is already in the library of babel in a new way. Same information still
@Cutie Cry I am not sure. I study physics but I am far from an expert in abstract math. But I believe the OP is referencing different levels of infinity.
She is saying that there is a reference somewhere in the Library of Babel to another set of books which can not be contained in the Library of Babel because they exist on a different level of infinity and are too large. (Or you could say another dimension if you like.) This other set of books would fill the entire library of babel and most of it would still be missing.
I can't think of a concrete example of how this might actually happen, but I believe she's right.
If someone takes every 5th letter in a book of Babel, there's even more possibilty to find Shakespear or Hamilton.
Have you read the sci-fi novel "Permutation City"? It has an idea similar to what you are describing. Except with an additional twist: what if there is a simulation of a conscious being contained in that book?
If I want to destroy the universe I'll simply go to the website and press print all.
Something that I would like to point out, as the Library of Babel is one of my personal favorite ideas:
It is actually not difficult to locate Shakespeare within the Library of Babel, at least not if the Library is organized. It is astronomically unlikely to randomly pull shakespeare from the shelves, but it is fully possible to find it if you are looking for it.
It is proposed, if the Library is sorted, that to find a book within the Library is no different than having written it yourself.
And this is also where the primary issue of that person declaring we must seek "The secret of immortality" comes from. Because the secret to immortality is certainly within the Library. As are 26 copies of the secret of immortality where the 'o' in 'of' is replaced with another letter. Along with another thousand copies where the primary ingredient to immortality is replaced with a different ordinary object or noble substance.
To find meaning in The Library Of Babel,
You must have already decided what means something to you.
We can narrow information down by not generating random letters but random english words with grammar rules
@@SirusStarTV This is true, though it will not improve a search for new information, simply reduce infinity to grammatically legible infinity.
there would be an infinite number of secrets of immortality that would kill you instantly
@@mys_mistree What you just proposed is literally just a regular library. Having the means to sort the Library of Babel defeats the whole point of the idea. As for what Gerydome proposed, they're on the right track for machine-learning algorithms. They just need to refine the algorithm far enough so that it starts generating paragraphs of sentences related to each other that contain no meaningless duplicates where each paragraph adds meaning and value to the overall article(or page in a book).
@@aikslf I didn't know your local library is infinite. That sounds pretty dope. And it wasn't the means to sort it, it was pre sorted. Though searching for meaning in Babel is nonetheless the same as writing the book you find yourself.
5:16 I love the idea of finding a door to the library of babel, opening it, and then just having the Blue Screen of Death appear to everyone including yourself
:(
The universe ran into a problem and needs to restart. We're
just collecting some error info, and then we'll restart for
you.
0% complete
[eldritch horror here] For more information about this issue and possible fixes, ask for the stop code book at the library
If you call a support person, give them this info:
Stop code: POINT_FLEW_AWAY
Imagine opening doors to the library of babel and the *Playstation 2 corrupted data tune* plays.
It seems like a lot of these thought experiments are themselves the art. They're elegantly executed and thought-provoking in their narrative form. The core idea isn't really that sophisticated; you could easily dumb it down to just "if a guy lived forever he would inevitably do everything." But these thought experiments instead utilize romantic settings of libraries, and the haunting spectre of cold, calculating machines, to evoke deep feelings about the random pointlessness of the universe, the infinite nature of time, free will, and other heady concepts. But lightly disguised as a practical, good-faith effort to just "see if we can."
This seems like a whole fascinating genre of meta-art... kind of reminds me a bit of that organ that's set up to play a single song over the course of 1,000 years or something. I forget if that was in an earlier Solar Sands video. It would be cool to see more videos about meta-art projects of this sort!
anyway iceberg 3?
@@jonathanbennet2580 Haha give him a little time
Literally took the words straight out of my head, except 1000% more detailed and sophisticated than whatever I could have said. Considering how this comment isn't even that complicated that says something.
Ok
True, interesting observation. Also, hi J.J. - A fellow British Columbian
“When speaking in infinities, ‘unlikely’ is just certainty waiting for its turn.”
-Narrator guy from In space with Markiplier
Everything within the universe is quantified and limited. Be that time, space, energy states or whatever you can imagine. So we can have things that are unlikely to the point that we can just assume it won't happen.
in space with markiplier is 😎
"The only way you find meaningful art in these libraries is by making it yourself" is the most weirdly motivating thing ive ever heard
lol i read this as it was being said in the video 12:23
Always an instant watch when it's a new solar sands video
"The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material."
― Michelangelo
Same as "Your problems have already been solved. It's just you haven't reached that point yet."
I would refer the library, canvas, and audio library of babel to be their own artworks with meaning within themselves, they're interesting, and have a profound message behind them.
I love how these projects all use the same title "of babel"
Because when you think about it, its like the tower of Babel, not in the sense that it reaches up to heaven, but rather that it results in mostly gibberish that people need to find meaning in.
Out of chaos, order, you mean?
@@pcm1011 out of order, chaos. Its the search for order that has produced this chaos in the first place.
@@averagejoe9040 So we should embrace chaos. I like that
@@ansuz5903 the only people who look for meaning in static are crazy people
@@averagejoe9040 Facts. Chaos is truth. Order is a lie.
As a musician, I always fear that what I’m playing will somehow have already been created even though I’ve never heard it. It IS possible to accidentally make a song somebody already has made.
One way to avoid the issue is to tune your instrument of choice to be way off key with normal even temperament tuning. Once the ear gets used to everything being off by a few cents, it'll sound normal, at least until you hear a regular song again.
Too late. Someone did the same thing that's on this video, but with music. Every note combination possible is contained in this. So whatever you compose, it has already been made.
@@NachtFaenger Ive seen the video on that and they said that their algorithm still had limitations and was limited to mostly western scales, etc. so it’s still possible to find something new don’t be discouraged
I'd have thought that it would be affirming and not dreadful that others have done what you have before you. Everything we do is inspired by our own influences, so to find others who have walked that path before for whatever reasons is inspiring. Given the fact that music has no ceiling, it shows us how we'd diverge from what others have done. Also given the fact that everything we do is influenced in some form by the external world, there's the argument that you should use audio piracy as a compositional prerogative.
it also matters when u make it bro. If Kanye's first album was Yeezus, maybe he wouldn't be as big as he is today.
"the infinite monkey theorem"
*bloon tower defense music start playing
...perfection
I’m glad someone else noticed this
Bro i wish i heard it before i sae this comment. Im listening on my phone speaker 💔
popping notes intensify
get on bloons
True
I feel like the thing about the library of babel is not that it takes too long to get a meaningful text, but let’s say to find out how to become immortal, there will be many books which tell you how to become immortal, but only one will be correct, and the others will tell you to eat dirt and piss from the window. You would already have to know how to become immortal to be able to say that this book says the truth.
When there is no real information given into something, you can’t get any out of it.
And the difference between the true way to get immortality and a fake one could be one word.
Welcome to the modern internet lol. It's all click bait and bots
Doesn't it follow, than, that no monkey could EVER type out Shakespeare, no matter how long it had to do it, b/c it could never do it to begin with? I think so. Also, wouldn't it point to the idea that one cannot 'redeem' one's self from a fallen and ignorant condition unless a wise and free one is leading the way? I think Man is helpless without God.
there's more than one "correct" book since there could be an extra space, or a misspelled word
Can we take a minute to appreciate the effort put into this video? Whenever I come here I learn something new. I don't know man, I feel lucky to be able to access this for free.
Cheers from Brazil!
oxi tu aqui
@@jayvmou4116 né kkkk
Uma delicia....
E a comunidade brasileira do Solar Sands se revela
Cara, que pessoa de cultura não assiste Solar Sands?
N é uma surpresa
I’ve given this some thought, and it still never ceases to amaze me. Somewhere in that library are the secrets to technologies yet uninvented, an unwritten screenplay whose film will make you cry 10 years from now, and formulas for medicines that could could save millions of people. And yet, even at our fingertips, it’s just all out of reach, surrounded by exobytes of random trash and so many near-misses and bad versions, as you say.
It’s an odd thought that ever piece of media ever created from the formation of this library - every masterpiece - was not just crafted but was in a sense “discovered” as a jewel among the dross, since it already exists somewhere. And yet there is no way to find it until it has been created.
Makes you think if every bit of information is discovered, learnt, or just created
You redditors are so gullible to actually believe this baloney
Creating that media is the same as finding it.
Geopbytes*
@@andrewsauer9669 Literally and that's what most people in this comment section don't understand. Anything in this world does not exist until you arrange it a certain way but it needs you
This video feels longer than 12 minutes, but in a good way. Like there's so much contained in it that my brain has to slow down to take it all in, making time feel slower.
_This_ is the kind of thing I love
Just the _idea_ that you could find something meaningful and absolutely live changing, but the _astronomically_ high odds that you'll actually find it
Depressing in a way, but absolutely fascinating
The odds are high because there's no way to know what you're looking for. It's way easier to find something meaningful and life-changing if you have an aim. Is that comforting?
@@saveoursquirrels4241 Very deep comment, mildly comforting
“I’ve found the meaning of life in the library of babel!” -said no one ever in the timespan of the universe
“The meaning of life is to be alive and live.”
-Joe Swanson idk
“Jdjsjsjxjsjxjsksjsjsjsjsiskicismsmxnx” -the library of babel
It can't be that hard to find 42 somewhere in there
@@nathanstoysandmore idk man, I personally liked "ernocnetnc7teh7o3tjv73t7itnv8thc7i3tn7cinrvne8nt3dny83fn8yueiunvten83ufnft8u8un3tnotev783tu83fnutucjeu9nfc8nic7teoumt4ynvy4tnuievn8yruhvturrgnviufnt8ytrnvrtng8urnvrgiuntriuvtiut7nojteifu8rgjfjuietjvuitenuienvuo"
Can't be 100% sure about that ;)
I once dreamt of the canvas of babel, but it was a map. Each pixel represented an area the size of our universe. My vision started off very close, so close that I could only see the one pixel representing our observable universe, but then I silently floated back into the unknown. Before me was an incomprehensible tapestry that represented everything, one that still haunts me till this date
What does each of the 4096 colours mean in that regard?
@@johnathanegbert9277 no idea. Perhaps the color indicated the average curvature of space-time in each given sector?
Holy fucking shit 😮 that’s terrifying but also enlightening
@@wolfetteplays8894 Holy shit fuckers 😮 Same.
Lol spacetime! Never ceases to amuse me when ppl use that term
I can still remember when this channel did deviantART reviews God how much this channel has grown brings me to tears
Same this channel has improved a lot
oh wow
Same
Yeah. Solar Sands is evolving.
Sounds like a down grade
Your videos strike a nerve of comfort in me like no other channel does.
I truly love your videos.
Plot twist: he got every frame of this video from the canvas of babel
lazy af tbh
Btw I got this comment from the library of babel
And his voice is just from the audio library of babel (tbh I’d prefer calling it “the soundtrack of babel”).
wow, I got an amazing library of babel canvas! I think I can decipher the text "Error 522"
I cant access it for some reason as well
The creator of the site is currently moving, since the site is self-hosted on his own servers, it is unavailable until the move is complete. He said on Reddit that he currently expects August 12 or later for when it will all be up and running again.
@@dominikdoom So I guess finding immortality will have to wait a bit
As a computer scientist these things are really interesting to me. It reminds me of the π filesystem. Since all digital files are essentially sequences of numbers (hence the name digital) it is possible to find an offset in the infinite decimal digits of Pi where any digital file you can comprehend exists. This means you don't need hard drives to store data, the data you want to store is baked into mathematics so you just need to store the offset in the digits of Pi that your file resides and the size of the file so you know how many digits to read. The issue with this is that the offset to find any particular file is almost certainly larger than the file itself so it's completely impractical. You can do the same thing with any irrational number.
Fascinating
That's super interesting, hadn't thought about it. Infinities really are strange. If we extend this idea to literally just information instead of files, wouldn't that mean that pi (if it truly is infinite and random) contains... all that there is? For example, there should be some substring of numbers in the pi-sequence that translates exactly to an ASCII-encoded text describing the entire history and future of the universe.
@@GS-tk1hk And probably many more describing it incorrectly, you won't know what's true until you've confirmed it (What if you are wrong?) or it has happened
@@natsudragneelthefiredragon Indeed, most definitely many more that are either plain wrong, or got a tiny detail wrong. And all of this is drowned in vast oceans of pure noise without any meaning at all. But the fact still stands, it's still in there, *somewhere*, hiding inside the ratio between a circles circumference and diameter... isn't that kinda mindblowing?
@@GS-tk1hk The human imagination does have limits though, what if the answer is something we simply can't describe? Especially in the library of Babel, having page limits means that some things like the secret to immortality and the history of the universe might not even exist in there, or be very incomplete potentially
It is mindblowing though, it's amazing.... Yet completely useless at the same time, to prove a point
I love this concept. I thought about it a few days.
There was a Steve Brunton video that showed a 20x20 1 bit image... Having more information than the universe. so I thought about writing a pixel shader to go through all of them. It would require a random bit shift register to never show an image twice.
Yes, 2^400 is a massive number.
And image space is vast. The key is to create a subset of this space by semantically structuring. Which now exists in plenty of languages models, image decoders etc.
in the SCP world, there's a magical place that connects to every universe called the Wanderer's Library. it's kind of like a more condensed version of the library of babbel in that it contains every text that has ever been written, will ever be written, and many that will never be, but it's all actual text written by someone. Even with its Librarians who can tell you the location of any book, how do you know that what you're reading is true? It's a pretty fascinating concept
Well, you can search for a specific book in the website too.
There’s also a separate website for it. Holds a bunch of unique, strange stories. Pretty cool.
Is it related to the satellite with a Homestuck Tumblr page?
There is actually an SCP before the Wanderer's Library called SC-1983 and is located in Buenos Aires, Argentina...
Since the libriry of Babel is a thing, the Wanderer's library should get all of it's contents
2:25 thank you for adding bloons tower defense music when talking about monkeys lol
Coming up with new stories was so much easier as a kid for me, every idea felt so original back then. I distinctly remember how my comic about a government controlling it's citizens by survellaince seemed like the most revolutionary story ever. Too bad 1984 ripped me off.
This is one of the most relatable UA-cam comments I’ve ever seen
Are you telling me what would have been Spider-Man 4 exists?
The Canvas of Babel does not contain art. It is art
It also contains art
@@olivernt2667 “It also contains art 🤓”
it contains an image of u farting bro
watch out bro, i have your exact address (if i get extremely lucky)
@@opixis yeah
I swear that a year ago i wanted to make canvas of babel after hearing about the library of babel, thinking it hasn't been done yet.
_I've never had an original thought in my life!_
_brain of babel_
Babel of Babels, a museum containing a list of every possible "--- of Babel" websites
Sculpture gallery of Babel: Rotating 3D models of every possible shape.
If this included shapes with detached parts, including pixel-sized parts, floating in the air, then it would look pretty similar to the Gallery of Babel. If it only included shapes where all parts are connected then there would be a lot of sculptures of multicolored bushes growing out of piles of multicolored gravel.
The hard part would be eliminating the 3D models that include disconnected parts.
Maybe a Tower of Bab- oh wait
Bold of you to think that the idea of Canvas of Babel hasn't already been written in the Library of Babel
In a weird way this is one the most inspirational videos I’ve ever seen. Even though that passionate story you’ve been writing for years has already been made, but nobody will find it until you can make it and match it
that’s a really nice way to think about it. made me smile
The video said the only way to find meaning in the images is to make it, which I take as finding meaning only if you create the image, or if you create the meaning. The meaning isn't there to find, but for you to create based on the image.
the craziest part is the library of babel probably holds the meaning of life inside of it.
"You cannot decode the library of babel because it contains words that do not exist yet, and all of the meanings future humans will assign to them."
I really like this. It really reminds me that old tiring argument that "my child could have painted/sung this"
Like yeah, anyone could. But none but that author did. Which also reminds me that we should always respect a worker, and always respect a creator.
I literally could have typed this comment
@@Eagle-2448 I literally could’ve typed this reply
ok
I really like this. It really reminds me that old tiring argument that "my child could have written this"
Like yeah, anyone could. But none but that author did. Which also reminds me that we should always respect a worker, and always respect a creator.
ok
It’s absolutely insane how this is somehow one of the most mind blowing things ever yet somehow is one of the most meaningless. It’s crazy to think how much interesting this is yet somehow is literally useless. The concept itself of infinity fascinates yet scares me
And in one of those pages what you just said is written. Yet in thousands of other pages what you said is altered in some way or even disagreeing with what you’ve put forth for us to read…
There is no infinity involved here…
@@falklumo it’s the closest you can get to something that is real “infinite” though on a human lifespan scale. But yes that’s true in a universal scale
A funny thing about the library of babel and the canvas of babel is that in the library there is a page with words "an image of this page with a stray pixel in coordinates x and z" and there is always an image for that in the canvas of babel.
The infinite possibilities of infinity. Funny, beautiful and scary at the same time.
My biggest fear ever since I was a child was being granted immortality, but damned to sort through an infinite amount of information, all with zero contact with anyone. This video is definitely living rent-free in the back of my mind now.
how did you even get that fear?
@@darkmatter412 Common sense.
@@darkmatter412 having severe ADHD and doing too much thinking
@@40watt53 lmao what
Were you considered a gifted kid? Because that would be a fairly interesting fear for any small child.
I find it sort of crazy that somewhere out there, there is a sequence of images in the image library of Babel that perfectly matches this videos, as well as the full script for this video in the text library of Babel. Maybe even the voiceover if there's an audio version that isn't just melodies.
“Meaning makes art”. That’s a great quote. I’ve often wondered what could be considered art now that we have AI generated imagery that could be considered art. I’d love to see a whole video dedicated to this topic
Currently losing my shit laughing at the phrase “Quantum Bogosort”
a couple years ago after learning about the Library of Babel I threw out some theories with my dad about a hypothetical "Gallery of Babel" containing every possible image on a 1080p canvas, so you can figure that naturally this video piqued my curiosity haha
The seed thing shows that it is effectively like guessing an encryption key, the encryptor generates what can only be considered useless noise unless you get the numbers just right, then it forms an image
a short number vs 10^961755, assuming random distribution and no reverse engineering it's far less likely to get an cohesive image, ever, than to randomly smash keyboard and get a PGP private key for a certain public key on the first try ...
While you were talking about Bogosort and the impossible yet alluring odds, how it's the same as the lottery, I couldn't help but think of another of Borges' short stories, The Lottery in Babylon, where he talks about this exact thing, how we both find and are stripped of meaning by randomness and chance.
I think the Library of Babel and other such concepts illustrate an all-too-common fundamental misunderstanding of information. Turning the abstract phase-space of possibilities into a physical archive of every possible permutation is less than worthless. Far from being a font of knowledge and meaning, the Library of Babel buries anything and everything useful under literal mountains of gibberish. You would still have to search for meaningful information, and the only effective way to do that is to write that information yourself, leaving you no better off than you would be without it.
I think it also serves as a good metaphor for finding meaning in life. Life itself has no fundamental meaning, being essentially a product of random chance. If we want our lives to have any meaning, we all end up having to make it for ourselves one way or another.
People think that the library of babel contains meaningful texts... but only when someone reads then, the reader themself will give it some meaning. I also don't like calling it a library at all... it's like saying the fibonacci algorythm is a book containing all fibonacci numbers.
Beautifully said about the life!
the way you ended this video sorta reminded me of this quote i like from the owl house:
“look kid, everyone wants to believe they're ‘chosen,’ but if we all waited around for a prophecy to make us special, we'd die waiting. and that's why you need to choose yourself.”
this made me recall a dadaist poem i read one time in a course about the avant garde- it was nonsense, but was meant to evoke some meaning through the melodic texture of the sounds when being spoken aloud, some of the nonsense words’ proximity to real words, and the connotation of rambling/senselessness with trauma from wwi. That is to say, an algorithim wouldnt be able to detect meaning in that, even though its a poem i still read, enjoyed, and wrote a paper about more than 100 years after it was written.
Okay, now you gotta tell me the name of the poem, op!
@@ivandriggs9077 its called karawane (the german word for caravan) by hugo ball. haha, i had to go searching through my old papers from college to find the name again
can’t wait for somebody to play bad apple on this
“The only way you find meaningful art in these libraries, is by making it yourself,” he said, with such confidence, not quite realizing what he inspired. Just think of it, everything that can ever exist, has ever existed, and does exist, all in an imaginary space. All at my fingertips. The entire collective of time, and I hold the key: my simple cell phone, product of fellow humans. Me and them the products of untold generations born from dead stars. Thank you solar sands, I truly am lucky. :)
" the products of untold generations born from dead stars"
you should have mentioned one of the most interesting aspects of the library: for every book of gibberish, there is another book somewhere that contains a cryptographic key that can translate the first book into meaningful language.
I don't think this fact is at all interesting given how it is trivially true. In fact, there exists an infinite amount of cryptographic keys for every book since you can simply define the cryptograph function as "add the values of the characters together, as defined by their places in the alphabet".
@@iCarus_A my point is that every book that looks like gibberish can be deciphered into something readable by another book somewhere in the library
Yeah the whole idea of "meaning" kind of breaks down when you think about the library of babel for too long. Technically _any_ book in the library could have _any_ meaning if you "decrypt" it the right way
@@samcavanagh7993 Why do all that? Somewhere in the library is the book of gibberish already undeciphered without needing the cryptographic key.
@@samcavanagh7993 yes, like I stated, that fact is trivially true...
I've had this interesting idea of a kind of video game of babel. Imagine, if upon booting up the game, it would randomly snatch a ton of assets from the unity store or something, randomly generate text as code, and then compile that code and assets in some kind of virtual machine. It would literally never even boot up, but its interesting to me. What if it did? What could it make?
im fascinated by this comment
a fixed version of Cyberpunk 2077 exists, we just have to find it
I wonder if any of the possibilities is a complete, functional remake of any game in existence
This is really cool
There’s an application for Doom called Obsidian that just generates random maps. What I find interesting is that there’s a chance you’ll just generate the original Doom maps.
I was just thinking of this today and this pops up in my recommended!
I'm really glad you took the time to talk about the Canvas of Babel, as I don't see a lot of people talk about it.
Putting Aphex Twin music (specifically: Selected Ambient Works Volume II) is the greatest idea of all; Aphex Twin’s music is like the full combination of every note to ever exist, Druqs’s a great example of this, so many song, so very distinct from each other; Avril 14th, the piano notes being so relaxing and sad in some way, compared to Afx.237 v7; A noisy like singing combined with lasers all over the song can take thousands, but millions of years to analyze every single note on Aphex Twin’s works.
Drukqs is the most underrated masterpiece of all time.
@@xylin3683 I'm on drukqs right now and I agree
2:30 I laughed when I heard the Bloons theme
2:02 is so important to understand. By its nature, this library contains many miraculous things. But it contains so many more false, destructive, malicious, and meaningless things. This archive encodes every digit of pi in its images, and that library encodes every digit of pi in its books as well. That library contains this very post, along with a million copies each with 1 typo, and trillions with 2 typos, etcetera. All in a section you could call "the ferociousfeind on the library of babel compendium", but good luck finding it.
There’s a search function, so….
@@cara-seyun the search function isn't omnipotent either. You can search for patterns, sure, but you can only search for information you already have. Effectively the search algorithm is finding where your data is already held in the massive library, but you cannot search for "the cure to cancer" and get anything other than lip service, or gibberish with the words "the cure for cancer" somewhere coincidentally in there
@@ferociousfeind8538 true, but it will significantly narrow it down
It does not contain every digit of pi as pi's digits are infinite while the library is finite.
@@magnusp25 no, the library contains every string of digits however many digits long, so you can reconstruct the entirety of pi by putting together the books in some order, repeats allowed. You can construct the entirety of pi out of the finite parts of the library of babel, out of a ridiculously small subset of the library of babel even, the books that are entirely digits and contain no letters or punctuation (except for the first one which starts "3.14.....")
As someone who is VERY familiar with the Library of Babel, it is very interesting that they created a subsection for images!
It is also worth mentioning that, just like the Library of Babel, entire documents aren't bound to only one image! Each frame could contain only a fraction of an image, and collecting all of them can make a higher resolution picture, with all the details you can ever imagine.
That's actually crazy to think about. For all we know these seemingly random images can just be an atomically small part of a way larger image and infact you aren't looking at just random pixels on the screen
Good theory, I wonder how many images squared you would need before some of these gibberish images make more sense?
All images in arbitrary resolution.
It is pretty spooky tho, to know that as soon as you have created a piece of work, whether that be written or an image, you can immediately go to the library of babel or the canvas of babel and find that it was always there, just waiting to be found. Though I guess in a way, it's more special that that work was created by a human with intention, vs a computer program that brute forced its way through an infinite series to get to that image that couldn't even be found anyway before it was created first by human hands.
This comment is in the library of babel so is the library of babel speaking to itself?
@@The_jam_man1906 And yours and mine too so maybe
this is an excellent video in general, and as a small insignificant detail, i also really appreciate the aphex twin in the soundtrack. was lovely and unexpected
These Mediums of Bable would be an extremely efficient way for a time traveler to send information to the past. A simple text document could contain coordinates to thousands of pivotal images and scripts. - If only there was some way to send a text message back.
Hey! So this is an interesting idea, but it turns out that it isn't quite right and it's for a reason that I think illuminates how these Archives work. The question is, how long will these coordinates be? If there are N things in the library, we need N different coordinates, because each one specifies a different thing in the library. Assuming these coordinates are numbers in base 2 (binary), we would need at least log_2(N) digits to represent numbers as big as N. But wait, we can apply the same logic to the things themselves. At the end of the day, images and sound and such are represented using binary digits, which are just numbers. And so we also need log_2(N) binary digits to represent the things. But this means that the coordinates aren't any more efficient! This might be counterintuitive, but think of it this way - the coordinates are just a different way of encoding the things. You can encode the things using their original representation, as images or sounds or whatever, OR as their coordinates. It's two different ways of encoding the same things. Sort of breaks the magic a bit, but I still think it's cool!
No, because the address of a supposedly meaningful text is longer than the text itself.
But how about sending a message with coordinates to the message you want to send? Iterate this indirection until the coordinates are short enough
@@mysteriousstranger2287 The page number is a long number, longer that the original message. Re-iterating the process would only make it longer.
Ah quantum bogosort. One of my first CS professors explained that one to the class. It of course ended with "The rest is left as an exercise to the reader"
I forgot this exists! Such an amazing concept, a Library that contains everything that will ever be but you can never find it... pure poetry
Imagine you write an essay and your teacher says you plagiarized the library of babel
This made me laugh
YES! ive thought about this site so much, just waiting for someone to find a coherent image randomly that is still random and impossible to take a picture of. since ai image makers however, its less likely to believe when someone does find one..
theres a proposition that every single page in the library of babel has meaning. that somewhere else in the pages lists a way to decode a pages text using the specific encryption algorithm and give its own answers and passages. but codes could be hidden under other codes. this makes every page infinitely longer in its informational usefulness, because somewhere an encryption key exists to decode that page, and that one holds a key to another, and a key may work for multiple, missing that one page would make the entire library useless and still equally as infinite
I like the message towards the end about having to ascribe meaning to art, life, and everything basically. The Canvas of Babel in a way reminds me of Minecraft and its various seeds of seemingly near infinite amounts due to the shear magnitude of possible seeds in a single version, plus the multitude of other versions that add new natural blocks or alter how worlds generate with all of their seeds.
Your videos cover the most interesting topics ever... i love this so muuch thank you
pongon 😁😁
Omg is pogon nonut 😮😮😮😁😁😁😁😁🍔
oongomg
oh my God made me
hhhhhhhh
made me the bogo sort 🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥶
Idk the fuck was all of this about but I sat and listened it through
Da king is back baby it's time for art
For a machine that finds meaning in the canvas of Babel. You could look at the AI Dall-e 2 as such a machine (given that it uses a different resolution). It starts out with a bunch of random pixels and then slowly adjusts them to get something meaningful, something that represents something other than random noise.
Is that really how Dall-E 2 works? That sounds really inefficient.
@@SolarSands i think that's how it was trained but now it just "knows" how to paint/draw or whatever you wanna call it
@@SolarSands Actually, it's alot more efficient than doing any other method at this moment, it's really fast and it just gets random pixels from random images in any topic
@@SolarSands Yeah it is called diffusion. To train this model OpenAi used a lot of different images and slowly added noise to them until the images were basically just random pixels and then made the AI recreate the image from the random noise. In turn the AI learned to turn any type of noise step by step into an actual image.
This technique is relatively new (that's why there are suddenly so many image generating API's that are popping up). The most popular technique used before were Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). GAN's are trained using two neural networks that are working against eachother. At first there is an AI (the generator) that generates images. This generated image then gets send to the other AI (the discriminator) along with an actual training image and the discriminator will determine which one is the real or fake one. If the discriminator was right the it receives a reward and the generator receives a punishment and vice versa. So the generator will start out making random noise but will eventually learn to make better images.
The diffusion approach turned out to be a lot better than the GAN approach for generating images.
Just by reading the title and remembering the Library of Babel website I got excited
Imagine just looking through the Library of Babel and going past detailed instructions to brewing the cure of cancer being written in a form of english that doesnt exist yet
“Babe, wake up. A new Solar Sands vid just dropped”
3:31 that is exactly like my experience trying to write a novel.
Minus the piss part right? …right..?
Always a great time when there’s a new Solar Sands video. Great work!
Oh, hey! I have something similar in one of my stories! It's called the Written Forest, and it's a forest with shelves upon shelves of books built into the trees, and in them is everything anyone will ever write. The leaves of the trees are covered in every thought that has ever has or will be thought, and the vines crawling up and down the trees contain every rule and law (universal or not) that has or ever will be created or discovered.
You could never have an ideia of how much I LOVE your videos. YOU COULD NOT EVEN CONCEIVE!!! Please don't ever stop, you are absolutely amazing.